nats-principal-engineer

name	nats-principal-engineer
description	Principal/Senior-level NATS playbook for subject design, request/reply, JetStream durability, consumer semantics, multi-tenant messaging, and operating lightweight event platforms at scale. Use when: designing evented systems with NATS, reviewing JetStream usage, tuning subjects and consumers, or operating NATS in production.

NATS Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Start from messaging semantics: ephemeral pub/sub, request/reply, durable streams, or control-plane signaling.
• Treat subject design, consumer semantics, retention, and topology as first-class architecture concerns.
• Prefer simple subject hierarchies and explicit delivery semantics.
• Design for debuggability and operator clarity before chasing messaging cleverness.

Default Standards

• Subject naming should encode bounded, meaningful routing intent.
• JetStream retention and ack behavior must match business semantics.
• Consumers must be idempotent where durability and replay matter.
• Multi-tenant usage needs policy before it needs scale.
• Observability should reveal lag, redelivery, and cluster health clearly.

References

• Subject design and routing semantics: references/subject-design-and-routing-semantics.md
• Core NATS pub-sub and request-reply: references/core-nats-pub-sub-and-request-reply.md
• JetStream durability and retention: references/jetstream-durability-and-retention.md
• Consumer design, acking, and replay: references/consumer-design-acking-and-replay.md
• Multi-tenant governance and security: references/multi-tenant-governance-and-security.md
• Cluster topology and operations: references/cluster-topology-and-operations.md
• Reliability and operations: references/reliability-and-operations.md
• Incident runbooks: references/incident-runbooks.md